The Biden Administration's Too-Cozy Relationship With Big Tech

Louisa Terrell, before becoming Biden’s director of legislative affairs, spent two years at Facebook at a key time.

by Andrea Beaty and Julian Scoffield, The American Prospect

Staring down the barrel of a Republican-controlled House in 2023, Democrats are juggling a litany of legislative priorities during the current lame-duck session. In addition to Congress’s looming obligation to fund an omnibus spending bill to fund the government, the pressure is on to enshrine same-sex marriage rights into law, bolster federal electoral procedures, add protections for pregnant women on the job, overhaul the farmworker visa program, prevent future Schedules F, and much more.

One of the legislative priorities that’s been apparently left by the wayside is the massively popular, bipartisan antitrust reform legislation. While the White House has reiterated its commitment to passing antitrust reform bills, the Biden administration has finite political capital and Congress has limited floor time. Every priority is in competition right now. But it would be easier to give the Biden administration the benefit of the doubt and see them as forthright in pushing for the antitrust bills if the key White House figure in charge of the White House’s agenda in Congress wasn’t a former Facebook lobbyist.

Biden speaks at a tech and trade conference

White House director of legislative affairs Louisa Terrell has long been a Bidenworld figure. Even before joining the 2020 transition team and being handpicked as his chief ambassador to Congress, she was the executive director of the Biden Foundation from 2017 to 2019. Before then, she worked on legislative efforts in Obama’s White House and was a member of Biden’s senatorial staff. But in between stints working for Biden, she revolved in and out of corporate gigs, most notably working as Facebook’s public policy director from 2011 to 2013. Terrell also worked as a deputy general counsel at McKinsey from 2019 to 2021, and did a six-month stint as Yahoo’s senior director for federal policy and strategy in 2008.